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For those of you that haven’t heard of skweee, go on the skweeelicious blog and find out for yourself you lazy fuck. Our job is to find the cool music, not write a fucking thesis on it. For everyone else you’re too cool to read this so don’t bother.
Photo by Emily Barnet
Download the Skweee mix by clicking the little arrow on the soundcloud player, you lazy uncultured fuck.
Boss Kite- Skweee Mix
Seeing as Skweee is a relatively new and underground style maybe you should give everyone a little introduction to the Skweee sound.
Take a synthesizer, and squeeze the funk out of it. That’s the general ethos of Skweee. It’s mid tempo, head bobbing stuff that has a real humour and personality that I haven’t heard in electronic music for a long time. I hear stuff like early electro funk from the 70’s and 80’s, G-Funk and Hip Hop, and 8-Bit chip tune but i’m not so sure the inspiration that the Skandinavian guys had when they started it.Other people are really starting to take it in a number of different directions these days though.
It’s not so restricted to tempo either. There’s no pounding four to the floor, or any beat that anyone really adhears too which gives you a lot of freedom when making skweee. As a producer i’ve found it quite liberating, taking everything back to a really basic form and limiting yourself.
I’m sure I’ve seen you raving at every Glade ever, you think Skweee’s got a chance on the UK festival circuit this year?
Not yet. I think there needs be a dramatic shift in the current UK underground before we really start seeing skweee make waves over here. Everyone loves the bass right now, and it’s one thing that skweee doesn’t focus on so much. A lot of people think of skweee being an off shoot from dubstep, partly due to the slow pace of it, and partly due to Eero Johannes ‘We could be skweeeroes’ track that has a kind of dubstep feel and a wobble bass in it. But the skandinavian guys have never really been influenced by that so much. It’s hard to relate it to most of the stuff coming from the UK right now, and it obviously wasn’t developed in this country, so it doesn’t have any ties to other forms of UK dance music.
Saying that, I think it’s got a really infectious quality that can just grab hold of people quickly, so you never know. It will be my dream to dance to skweee on a sunny sunday afternoon at glade festival, but i think we might have to wait just a little while longer for that. I’ll be happy to see it lurking in the undergrowth for a while yet.
So your doing your first live set at Donky Pitch on the 18th Feb. can you give us an idea of what toys your gonna be playing with?
I’m a controller freak and since starting with Ableton a few years ago, I literally haven’t touched anything else since. I recently purchased a LaunchPad which is what i’m mainly gonna be performing the set on, along with some synth modulation with a microphone. I’ve got plans to involve some more live elements eventually, like vocoding and some MIDI guitar, but for the first set, I just wanted to keep it simple, and make it cohesive and good to listen to, as a set, rather than getting too bogged down in the elements of control and performance. I’ve often gotten a bit sidetracked by stuff like that when creating live sets in the past.
Your the only guy from Brighton and maybe the UK we’ve heard of making Skweee, any other local funksters out there we should check out?
The guys from donky pitch are doing a great job promoting this new wave of underground wonked out/ funky ass bass music. It’s great to have some forward thinking promoters in Brighton again putting on great nights. Promoters Aka Aka Roar are getting some great names into town too, including Untold, Appleblim and Brackles. Stuff on the more 2 step side of Dubstep. Totally loving that sound at the moment, and am glad I don’t have to trek up to london to see the big names in that field.
In terms of artists, its great to have Slugabed in town with his residency at Donky Pitch, who seems to destroy the soundsystem every time i’ve seen him. Deadfader are also a Brighton duo to watch out for. I’ve known the guys for a while, and they’ve recently started making some incredible stuff. Kind of big noisy dubstep with a totally twisted edge. It’s pure filth.
Have you had any response from the Scandinavian pioneers to your tunes? Do they dig Brighton Skweee?
As soon as I had a demo of my first boss kite track I sent it to Harmonia and Flogsta, just to let them know they had support from this side of Europe. The track was pretty sketchy, but they were really encouraging, and welcomed me with open arms. The community is pretty small right now, so it’s kind of personal the way we all know each other (musically at least) and help promote each others music. Obviously the internet has been great. The Nation of Skweee forum, Skweelicious blog, and a great user base on soundcloud has really helped build up a community for the genre across the globe.
You also play keytar in :kinema: any dirty gossip you can give us on the other :kinema: guys?
Andy is absolutely rubbish at washing up, and Dom wishes he was an RnB singer a little TOO much on some days. We’ve been playing for a while now and have been gigging pretty intensely recently, so those guys are kind of like brothers to me. You’ll have to wait for my memoirs for the real juicy stuff.
Randy Barracuda said in the Skweee movie that learning to make Skweee was like learning how to masturbate, any advice for young kids out there learning how to jack off?
Put some skweee on the turntables and do it real slow.
Boss Kite-CKMY
Boss Kite plays his debut live set at Brighton’s coolest night Donky Pitch, this Thursday at the Jazz Rooms so get yo Booty’s down there and get funkin’
Booty Galaxy 